Over the past few months, I had the privilege to immerse myself in Linux expert training. Guided by the expertise of Michael Kerrisk, the author of The Linux Programming Interface, I coded and philosophized my way through the first principles of the Linux world.
The first training involved the operating system architecture and low-level interfaces needed to build Linux-based systems. The five-day intensive training was an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the power of epoll, signals, Linux APIs, and multiple practical use cases, such as implementing non-blocking servers with an efficient thread count.
The second training was a journey into the depths of low-level Linux privileged applications and containers, virtualization, and sandboxing. By the end of this training, I could review Docker’s and Podman’s architecture decisions with detailed arguments (that daemon!). This intensive, four-day course was a real eye-opener. Before it, and as an example, I thought I had a low-level understanding of Linux capabilities or the UTS namespace. However, Michael’s training offered many new insights into the principles behind these features. One of the course’s highlights was building containers from scratch after understanding the workings of namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, and more.
Moreover, students get access to highly technical material and practical exercises, primarily written in C and Go but all languages that implement the relative operating system interfaces can be used. The labs were a hands-on experience, allowing me to apply the knowledge from the training and the book The Linux Programming Interface to real-world instances (spoiler: buffering is a key concept).
Completing the material on a native Linux installation or a VM solution that allows kernel settings adjustments is highly recommended but optional. I used Ubuntu 23, and VirtualBox served me well, especially for the cgroup sections.
I can’t thank Michael Kerrisk enough for this exceptional training. His book, The Linux Programming Interface, and his guidance have significantly improved my understanding and skills in Linux. I highly recommend the trainings for anyone interested in security, containers, systems programming, or any combination of these (https://man7.org/training/).